The 4 Most Effective Twitter Calls to Action

by Pam Dyer

What should I tweet?

This is one of the most common questions that brands ask. Data from a recent study conducted by Optimal indicates that Twitter delivers a smaller — but more active — audience than Facebook. But Twitter is less understood as a marketing channel, and many social media marketers are unsure about what to do when it comes to executing well-planned promotional strategies on the platform. So what can you do to jumpstart a Twitter initiative using 140 characters or less?

Social media marketing must include calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) are an essential part of inbound marketing. Their goal is to convert a user into a lead, and, later, into a customer. They are a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus on the action your want them to take.

Twitter recently analyzed more than 20,000 Promoted Tweets that were randomly sampled over a 3-month period. They examined how various types of Promoted Tweet engagements differed depending on which types of calls to action were included, and compared them to a baseline of Promoted Tweets that did not include any calls to action. Here are the results:

4 best Twitter calls to action

1. Ask for a download

Have a new product to promote that’s available for download? Tweets in timelines that explicitly ask people to download from an included link increase URL clicks by an average of 13%. Tweets in search that feature this call to action increase clicks by an average of 11%.

Tips from Twitter:

Give people clear direction

Offer an incentive to click

Use hashtags and @ mentions sparingly to keep users focused on one action

You can also set a deadline to increase the sense of urgency

2. Ask for a retweet

Want to turn followers into advocates and generate earned media? Offer a clear, compelling reason to retweet your messages. This increases retweets by an average of 311%.

I have tried it and had some reasonable success, both personally and at the company I work for. People like to share “catchy” tweets, so it’s about crafting creative messages of 140 characters or less with that in mind.

Don’t forget to leave room for retweeting. If someone does a
text-retweet (instead of a native Twitter retweet) of something I’ve shared, the beginning will read: “RT @pamdyer ” — that’s 12 characters, including spaces, right off the bat. So to make tweets easy to share, you need to leave enough room for those characters and, if possible, a bit of space for the retweeter to add a brief 1-2 word comment.

Hope this helps, and thanks for reading my blog!

Lush Fab Glam

Great tips Pam, especially asking for a retweet and reply, I will apply them to future social marketing campaigns for my blog http://www.Lush-Fab-Glam.com to see how they work.